The surveys show that the weather service issued warnings on nine of the 10 tornadoes but missed with a warning on the last one of the morning -- an EF-1 with peak winds of 100 mph -- which touched down at 7:48 a.m. in Elmore County.

"Ideally there'd be no tornadoes without a warning and no warn­ings without a tornado," said John De Block, warning coordination meteorologist at Birmingham's National Weather Service office. "So in other words: no missed warnings, and no false alarms."

The missed tornado in Elmore County "was embedded in a line of showers and thunderstorms," and thus difficult to detect, De Block said. It was a type of tornado -- from a quasi linear convective system -- that gives forecasters fits because of its difficulty to detect, he said.

"That's the bad news; the good news is that these tornadoes tend to be relatively weak," he said.

The weather service conducts the damage surveys -- not just to document the size, number and path lengths of the tornadoes for the historical record -- but to eval­uate the forecasters' warning per­formance and seek ways to im­prove, he said. While technology has come a long way, it's still not perfect, he said. The current radar system, for example, can't confirm whether a tornado has touched down -- and the farther away the radar from the storm, the more difficult the storm is to read.

"We never know for sure based on radar whether a tornado is on the ground," he said.

"That's why we rely on reports from storm spotters, first responders and emergency management."

The Elmore County tornado damaged the shingles and siding of 10 to 15 homes and blew the roof off an apartment complex before it lifted near the Wetumpka Municipal Airport, according to the weather service survey.

The weather service had warnings on all of the other tornadoes, although the warning on an EF-1 in the Enterprise community of Chilton County was issued at 6:36 a.m., the same moment as the tornado touched down, according to the survey. All of the affected areas had tornado watches in place.

The other warnings ranged from 10 minutes to one hour in advance of touchdown. The time between the warning and the touchdown of the Oak Grove tornado that killed 81-year-old Bobby Frank Sims in his mobile home was 38 minutes. The time between warning and touchdown in Tarrant of the tornado that killed 16-year-old Christina Nicole Heichelbech in Clay was 26 minutes.

"Anything better than a 10- to 15-minute lead time is pretty darn good and should give people sufficient time to save their lives," said Greg Carbin, warning coordination meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Storm Prediction Center. "The unfortunate thing in this case, it was the middle of the night and some may not have had a place to go or heard sirens."

De Block said this tornado outbreak reinforced the need for everyone to have multiple sources of warning information and one of them should be a NOAA Weather Radio, which can wake you up at night.

"It really highlights the need for weather radios," De Block said. "And it highlights the fact that here the tornado season really is Jan. 1 to Dec. 31. There's not a single month you are not at risk for severe weather." De Block said damage surveys ended Wednesday so the tornado count will likely stand, unless someone calls in to report damage from an area they haven't seen.

The latest confirmed tornadoes include the one in the Enterprise community of Chilton County and one near Childersburg in Talladega County.

Other counties hit include Elmore, Jefferson, Perry, Sumter, St. Clair and Tuscaloosa. The strongest tornadoes reported so far were two that were labeled EF-3 tornadoes, a category of tornadoes with winds between 136 mph and 165 mph.

The longest path was 39.5 miles long and belonged to an EF-2 rated tornado with estimated winds peaking at 130 mph, the survey found. It started in central Perry County, traveled northwest through Maplesville in Chilton County before lifting in Clanton.